African American Poetry

African American Poetry

 

Bibliography:

Woodson, Jacqueline. 2014. Brown Girl Dreaming. New York, NY: Penguin Group.  ISBN 978-0-399-25251-8.

Summary/Analysis:

Brown Girl Dreaming is Woodson’s collections of poems that tell her life stories and memories in free verse.  The entire autobiography is divided up into five parts with each part focusing on a change that happened in her life and take place in a new location.  The beginning of the book has a table of contents and a family tree that helps the reader keep up with the relationships in the story.  The end of the book has a letter of thanks and a photo album of Woodson and her family which really help the reader connect with her life story and experiences.  

Woodson’s free verse poems (with some Haiku) are varying in length and full of emotion and imagery.  She often uses figurative language to describe her feelings in different situations throughout her story.  Several poems are grouped together throughout the book(writing series, how to listen, after greenville, halfway home) while most of them are individual and unique to the specific situation and as simple as one haiku about her grandfather waking her up at night because he was coughing. Woodson uses descriptive language to make the reader feel that they are there with her.  This autobiographical collection of poems is great for upper elementary and an amazing selection when covering the Civil Rights movement.

Use:

sometimes, no words are needed

Deep winter and the night air is cold. So still,

it feels like the world goes on forever in the darkness

until you look up and the earth stops

in a ceiling of stars. My head against

my grandfather’s arm,

a blanket around us as we sit on the front porch swing.

Its whine like a song.

You don’t need words

on a night like this. Just the warmth

of your grandfather’s arm. Just the silent promise

that the world as we know it

will always be here.

So many of Woodson’s poems really capture a moment and give the reader a sense that they are there with her.  I would read this poem several times and have students close their eyes to imagine that they are there on the porch.  Have students come up with times in their life when they wish they could stop time forever and stay in that moment.  Have them either create their own poem or come up with several sentences using sensory language to help the reader feel as though they are also in that moment.